Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sync Up podcast, your one-stop shop for all things OneDrive. OneDrive is the home for all the files that you care about most, and we’re to take you behind the scenes to get the insights and the knowledge to make your experience and your users experience better. My name is Stephen Rice. I’m a Principal Product Manager on the OneDrive team, and as always, I am joined by my intrepid cohost, Arvind Mishra.
Hello, everyone. I’m Arvind and I’m also a Principal Product Manager on the OneDrive team. Before we get started, I want to encourage everyone to check out our newsletter at aka.ms/onedrive/join.
So Stephen, I want to take a second here to acknowledge that today is our first video-based episode of Sync Up, and I got to say, I’m a little unnerved. I mean, I’ve never done a video podcast. I know you’re an expert at doing all things podcast. I have a face that is optimized for Radio. I’m a little scared, like, how’s this going to go?
We’ll see. We’ll see how much we can fix you up in post, you know, get some editing, maybe we’ll put in – I’m thinking like 85% of our budget into our Arvind’s, you know, face special effects, but –
Well spent.
We’ll see what happens. Now, before we get too far, the other call we got to make is this should be coming out right before the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. We would love to have you all there. Hopefully, you’ve already got it scheduled. If you’re interested, check out the OneDrive blog for more information. I will be there. I’m looking forward to talking to all of you and seeing you there. Hopefully, we got some cool swag to get out too, which is always fun. Now, we’ve got some great topics today. We’ve got a Vishal and Yogesh here to join us and talk about some cool things. We’re going to start with an ad read about some totally valid real products that you can buy right now. And then we’ll jump into our main topic today which is migration. But to start with Vishal, Yogesh, welcome to the show. Why don’t you want to tell us a little bit about yourselves?
Thanks for having us. Hello, everyone. My name is Vishal Lodha, and I am the Principal Customer Experience Program Manager here in OneDrive and SharePoint team at Microsoft.
Thank you Stephen and Arvind for having us. My name is Yogesh. I am also a Product Manager on the OneDrive and SharePoint team, and I lead the migration tech for ODSP.
So before we get started, we always like to kick things off with a little bit of fun, kind of an icebreaker question for our guests and for ourselves. So as we’re recording this it is Spring Break time here in the U.S., so a question for the three of you. Vishal you can start, but where do you most want to visit? Budget is no consideration, where – what’s your choice?
I’m not sure how many people will agree with this but I have a very unique set of parameters, you know, anywhere it’s a warm but between 70 and 80 degrees and not a lot of sun.
Not a lot of sun, so where – where in the world would that be then, because I feel like I to extremes, either really cold or really not
I think I would cut the mark because, you know, it’s – it’s consistently between 70 and 80 days, it’s breezy, there’s clouds. You know, it rains, but not that much compared to other parts, and so I just feel like too much – anything above 80 is – I get sunburned easily, and so – you know, I enjoy it. If I’m on vacation, I want to enjoy.
I too suffer from that affliction. Arvind, what about you?
Yeah, I think I would love to go to Egypt at some point because I just – I’m a – I’m a hound for like old buildings, old cultures, you know, things that have outlasted, outwitted – you know, like humanity in general. And so I feel like, you know, the pyramids and a lot of things that are going on there were would be well worth seeing, so that’s – that’s on my bucket list right now.
Yogesh, what about you?
Yeah, so I cannot agree with Vishal more. Living in the Pacific North – Northwest, you know, I’m so starved for sunshine, but not too much sunshine because I’m not used to too much sunshine, so I – I also prefer a – kind of a partially cloudy day over a too-bright day, and Hawaii is definitely my kind of go-to place.
Stephen, like, did you – what about you, like –
You all took this way more literally. So my – I’m thinking, I want to go on a vacation that has no budgets. And I can do like my – my perfect experience. Have you guys seen the space balloon? Like it’s a –
Yeah.
It’s like got – I don’t know, like half-a-million dollars or something absurd, but it takes you up (crosstalk) –
(Crosstalk) a meal up there?
Yeah, I mean, I don’t care about the meal, but like, I would love to do, like low-Earth orbit trip. Not in the like Bezos and "I want to own a rocket company." Like, I just want to take some space tourism, you know, see the stars, see the planet. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but that’s – that’s my dream vacation. Oh and safely because you know, it’s not exactly a reliable method of travel – travel.
You don’t want to be first on this – on this balloon, I would say.
I want to be on, like a well-trusted machine that has made this flight multiple times, not the ones that, like – there’s like a one in six chance it blows up on the landing pad, but maybe someday we’ll get there.
I think those are all good aspirations, and these are all great answers, and so I’m sure the audience now has a great sense of who all of us are.
[TCR 00:05:03]
So today, before we get into the meat of today’s discussion, we’ve got a word from our sponsors. M365 Basic is our consumer subscription offering that offers OneDrive storage and its Outlook features. And we’re now adding advanced security features for existing subscribers to the low, low price of three.
Have you ever noticed how we’re all just storing our lives in the cloud now? I mean, where is the cloud? Is it in my house? Is it above me? Does it ever rain data? Is my data secure? And what happens when it’s sunny? Does my cloud disappear?
I mean, you’re totally right, Steve. I’ve been storing all my personal stuff in OneDrive with a basic subscription with its 100 gigabytes of storage and ad-free Outlook and advanced email security features, and it’s pretty much fitting my needs, but now with these new features, it’s like my documents, my photos, my files. They’re like living in a luxury condo up there. Ransomware protection. It’s like having a digital bodyguard for my vacation. It’s like I’m picturing a bouncer who is like, "Don’t worry, sir, I’ve got your selfies covered."
Sounds nice, and this whole like personal vault thing. Why do my files get a vault? I don’t even have a vault for my actual important things. My files are living better than I am.
And these file sharing links, I mean, you can set them to expire. I mean, it’s sort of like telling your friends, "Yeah, you can borrow my lawnmower, but it’s going to disappear in 48 hours."
And don’t get me started on offline access. So my files can just come with me wherever I go. Even if I’m in a cave or on a beach in Hawaii, don’t worry about it, we’ll just hang out with you in this no-service zone.
Stephen, we’re just two simple guys, trying to make sense of this digital hoarding world. We’re just trying to do this one byte at a time.
And you know what, at the end of the day, aren’t we all just trying to find a safe cloud to store our digital clutter? That is what Microsoft 365 Basic is for you.
I don’t think we’re going to win any awards for that, but well done.
Thank you. Thank you. I – I think that was a delightful ad read. It was totally natural, but seriously, we work on OneDrive, we work on all the kind of plans and stuff like that, so check out Microsoft 365 Basic for your cloud computing needs. But let’s switch over to our main topic. We’ve dragged Vishal and Yogesh here on video to talk about migration, so let’s kind of get things started.
So just to kind of kick things off, Vishal or Yogesh, where does this come from in the first place? Why are customers looking at Microsoft 365 and trying to migrate?
Yeah, great question. Obviously, you know, cloud computing is becoming a super-important part of our lives, as you just talked, both personal and professional or consumer and enterprise. Of course, Yogesh and I focus a lot on the enterprise side, so we’ll cover that part, and that includes, basically, you know, business customers, like small, medium, SMB customers as well. A lot of them are, you know, obviously migrating, or I should say consolidating on M – Microsoft 365.
You know, as – as the businesses form and then evolve, you know, they were using a lot of best-of-breed tools, and once, you know, things started to mature in the market, our platform offered a lot of integration, you know, seamless collaboration between the apps, great security and compliance features, and you know, we started to become top choice for our customers, especially enterprise.
Ninety-five percent of the Fortune customers use Microsoft 365, and so it’s just – we have seen a tremendous amount of growth, just because of the – the integrative platform offering that we have, and for customers, it’s – you know, total cost of ownership to manage that platform, to manage the service drivers. They all come down to a significant point, so it’s a combination of productivity, security, compliance, integration effect, as well as, you know, financials and economics.
So Vishal, so what I’m hearing, at least, I – there’s a lot of things in there, but like let’s – let’s break it apart. So a bunch of customers, you know, they start out maybe a small company in a garage, and they’re using all kinds of tools, like a – one – one tool for chat, one tool for video, one tool for storage, one different tool for calculating, like a calculator. And so they come to your door, and they’re like, "Hey can you – we’re getting big, or we’re at a certain size and we can’t manage all these tools," is that sort of like a common use case scenario, is what it sounds like?
Yeah, definitely, that becomes a compelling event. You know, and – and there are customers who – who were not necessarily small to start with, but they came from the on-prem world so they had, you know, a lot of servers that were used for collaboration on-prem, and applications, and the – as those start, you know, shifting to cloud, that – that paradigm shift happens, the mindset changes.
[TCR 09:58]
And so it – it comes together, irrespective of what journey a customer is following, you know, whether it’s the natural growth and maturity, or a mature customer just adopting more and more of cloud and software as a services platform, it comes together.
To kind of kick things off, I want to play a little bit of a game. Are you – have you guys ever seen the show MythBusters? I mean, it’s a little – I feel like it’s a little old at this point, but like you know, the whole idea was they would take a myth, you know, like a bull in a china shop, is that actually – do bulls actually break china if you put them into a shop? And then they test it and find out if it’s the case or not.
So when I think about migration, migration is complicated or feels complicated. And I know a lot of customers feel that way too. So let’s run through some of the biggest myths we hear from our customers about migration. And we can see, you know, do any hold up? Is it true? Is it not? Busted. Is it confirmed? Arvind, do you want to take our first myth?
Yes, I would love to take our first one. And by the way, I really liked that MythBusters show. I was going to say, I saw this one episode where they were talking about does quicksand actually really kill you, and it doesn’t, like it doesn’t – you don’t actually really sink into the quicksand like they do in the movies, but anyways.
Okay, we just talked about this. We just – we touched on it. So I think there is a lot of people out there that believe that migrations to the M365 cloud and suite, they’re only for on-prem customers or cross-tenant migrations. Like that’s what – that’s what people think, is that true or not?
Yeah, that’s definitely how it started, but it’s not true anymore, Arvind, so I would bust your first myth here, right here. We see a huge amount of customers coming from third-party cloud storage providers, and that has become a pretty growing trend right now for the same reason that Vishal mentioned before, where customers are trying to consolidate, they’re trying to do more with less in this tight economy, and Microsoft is often the right solution, and it applies to the scenario you mentioned, Arvind, where a company is growing up, and they are already on cloud, but now they want to move to a more consolidated, more secure and compliant solution.
In fact, I worked for a startup a few years ago, and we – we moved to Microsoft, and it was a big deal, but when it was done, we were pretty happy. So we do move from the third-party cloud storage providers, just as much as we do from on-prem, so Vishal do you want to add anything.
No, I think – I think you covered it really well. Yeah, it’s – it’s people think, like, "Oh, we’re already on cloud, why do we need to, you know, consider a change," and I think because of the reasons I said before, managing individual platforms for, you know, a very specific function becomes a lot of overhead for a lot of IT departments. I talked to a lot of CIOs and CTOs and they’re trying to consolidate, not only just in terms of operations, but also reducing the overhead and management of platforms and things like that, and then of course, the productivity is a big thing.
I mean, imagine your workflow when you are, you know, switching your Windows – you are going for – you’re calling or conference calls on one tool and then going for chat from another tool, and then you are going for your productivity commodity apps, like, you know, spreadsheets, or you know, authoring documents, on like – it’s, it’s not seamless, where with Microsoft, you know, our – starting with Office apps and tight integration with our cloud, you can start a document, share it right there to your cloud workflows, your - your recipients get the documents, the co-authoring starts, the notifications happen, all within the entire family of products that’s part of this platform, so it’s pretty seamless. You really don’t have to, you know, leave, and you know, juggle multiple platforms or windows to get this thing done.
One of things I definitely learned doing this podcast is, you know, we’ve talked about a bunch of different topics from sharing to web to sync, but even then, it’s hard for us to talk about just OneDrive, because some of the amazing things that M365 offers just come from our partners inside of Microsoft and make the experience better.
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s the glue that puts it all together, Stephen.
Oh, I like that, glue. Myth number two – so this is another one I hear quite often. It’s like, "Hey, I am a small business. I’ve got like 10 licenses. I’ve got 25 employees. I don’t need to migrate, right? Like, I – Microsoft is too complicated, the tools aren’t going to work for a company like me," true or not?
Well, I’ll take a shot at debunking this myth. It’s actually even more important for smaller companies. You know, they don’t have the grander IT budgets compared to large organizations, so – and they don’t have the headcount to manage some of the IT infrastructure. So moving to a unified consolidated platform even makes more sense.
Again, as I’ve said, definitely economically, but from a security, compliance, productivity, integration between different applications, it’s – it’s even more productive because more organizations are being asked to do more with less, as much as bigger ones are, so they – they really – actually, people in more orgs do multiple roles, and sometimes wear multiple hats, so they need to be more productive, more efficient, and I’m not saying the largest don’t have to be, but it’s critically important for them as well as any other organization.
[TCR 00:15:18]
As you say, as a startup, like, you kind of just want to spend more of your time building your product versus trying to make the things that enable you to build your product work better together. And so I could – I could totally see, you know, just having everything, having a suite of products that just work really well together, it’s going to just make you that much more productive and just bring like a – like I would just think, from like an overhead perspective, if you’ve got, you know, 10 different products, one bill shows up, you know, on the 10th of the month, another bill shows up at the 20th of the month, and then another one, so the 24th, so it’s just – it’s kind of a headache to probably manage all of that, right? And so just having all of that in one place feels like it’d be a huge win even for a small company.
Absolutely, and Arvind, to that effect, we have been putting a lot of emphasis to empathize with this model tenant, smaller customers, because they don’t have the IT horse – horsepower to manage the complexity of migration which was acknowledge is still a big deal, so we have been doubling down to simplify your migration expenses so that an IT admin in a small shop who we call – whom we call and excellent admin – you know, this person is not really an admin, but they’ve been tasked to do this migration.
You know, it could be a teacher who is relatively tech savvy in a school, right? And want to serve her as well, and that’s – has been a lot of focus for us in the migration team, not just within OneDrive/SharePoint, but across mail and, you know, other workloads.
You preempted my question, Yogesh, but I was going to say, like, submit for this one I – I can see people listening, customers, like, "Wait – wait a second, my – I’m a small business, Vishal is wearing a suit, clearly Microsoft does not care about us. If you cared about me, you’d wear, you know, relatable clothing, like t-shirts, like Arvind and I, clearly." Vishal, do we care about these small customers? Do we want to make sure our experiences work for them?
Absolutely. I mean, we care. Look at the Microsoft, you know, offerings. Like, if you go back 10 years, if you had an enterprise product, it was almost impossible for a small business or a nonprofit to enjoy the same level of features and services, like an enterprise product.
Here, we are talking about Fortune 10 companies using the same technology and features, compared to a 50-person nonprofit. I think micro – Microsoft has democratized this whole process by giving everyone the same product it delivers, irrespective of how many people you have on your payroll or how much revenue you bring to the company or your organization, so it’ – it’s, it’s totally, like – and our licensing model is very flexible, like we offer bundled SKUs, and we also offer individuals, so customers can pick and choose what meets their needs and they can still be doing best-in-class work here.
I love it Vishal. As I said, you were just – what’s the phrase, like, always be selling, ABS?
ABC, ABC, always be closing – always be closing.
Always be closing. Yeah. That’s why I’m a PM and Vishal because of the closing –
He’s got the suit.
Okay, myth number three. So one of the things I think people worry about when they think about migrating content into the cloud is throttling. We’ve got tons – gigabytes and gigabytes of data in our on-prem installation, in our – you know, competitor cloud, whatever it might be, and it’s, "If I try to move all that into Microsoft I’m going to get throttled and the experience is going to be awful, throttling is a terrible thing." Is that a case? What is – tell me a little bit more about throttling. Is this actually the demon in the cloud – my analogy is not working – that people think it is?
Well, if I had a choice, I would put – print a t-shirt, that way I can get it off my – this, you know, sportscoat, and you don’t call me out again, but I’ll say throttling is safe. I think that’s the new paradigm shift, that we need to bring a change – like, throttling is – like, I consider throttling as a – as a fuse in my, you know, electric box, or a circuit breaker, basically.
What does that mean – is, obviously, the cloud is a multi-tenancy service. We have a concept of neighborhood here, and throttling exists to prevent a noisy neighborhood, a noisy neighbor, actually, to bother – to like prevent them bothering other neighbors, right?
What we don’t want is one customer migrating to our service and it impacts other customers and their end users, and their – of course, end user experience, so what we do is, we – we kind of basically provide throttling as a mechanism to protect other customers, other service, and make sure customers take, you know, fair advantage of what they’re going to get out of service. Yogesh, maybe anything you want to add here?
[TCR 00:19:54]
Yeah, absolutely. So I will bust this myth further by reframing the mental model. It’s throttling is like a speed limit. And you don’t say I didn’t reach the destination because of the speed limit. And that’s how we look at this throttling. Speed limits exist for safety, like Vishal said. It also helps you plan. And our best recommendation for customers and the customers who successfully migrate are those who plan really well.
And our partners, including the ISV partners who really accelerate offering a great throughput are those who are following best practices. In some ways they’re planning, through that speed limit that we, you know, have set in place for the right reason. So throttling is not that. Throttling is there for – for safety, and to actually help you move at the optimal speed.
In fact, I would say, migration has the most lenient throttling limit of all other applications, because we realize that this is a big pipe, and we need to enable the capacity that it deserves, compared to like an end user, right, to stream videos over video, right, with that person, or that particular scenario, it would be far more throttled than a legitimate migration happening during the weekend.
So maybe I would think about it in three ways, like - number one, if you’re a customer that is migrating your stuff in there, if you plan well ahead, and you do the correct planning, you’re not even going to really encounter throttling. And once you are a customer, and all of your data is in there, you are going to be happy that we have throttling is maybe how I would think about it. Because like, yeah, you just don’t want your – your quality service to be impacted by the noisy neighbor that Vishal was calling out earlier.
Absolutely. I would add one more thing, Arvind, here, is – it starts with throttling concern because that’s the most obvious one. Often, the bottlenecks are different. Like if you’re moving from on-premise, the reading from your on-prem sources is what throttles you more or bottlenecks you more than anything else. When you’re pulling data out of third-party storage providers, it’s the source throttling that you need to worry more and plan again ahead of it and ask for the right API rate limited with your incumbent storage providers.
So it goes back to the planning. And it seems obvious, and that’s why people worry about it, but there are some of the non-obvious things that, you know, Vishal and I help customers with, think about it beforehand so they’re not surprised.
Yeah, and if my – I can add one more thing. Our tech has really evolved over the last few years to give a lot more, you know, signal to customers or the tooling they are using to migrate in terms of when they can send us more data and when they need to slow down. Like, we give that information through our, you know, APIs and (inaudible), things like that, so the tools have become smart enough on both our ends to have the right amount of handshake at any given time to get the pipe going consistently, and if – if there’s an imbalance, then we – we send those signals and re—recalibration happens, and so – or it’s rebalancing happens, and we are – we’re back in business.
So I think it’s – it’s a good thing. Our ISVs are really taking advantage of some of the signals that we send through the API mechanism, and again, as Yogesh said, if you plan it right, and if you know the information architecture and your data, I think throttling will happen. I’m not saying that it will not happen, but it’s going to be minimal as long as the planning and the – and the spread of that data is, you know, looking good.
What I’m getting out of all of this, because I’m not a technical person, is that migrations are kind of a big deal that said, this is myth number four. I’ve heard that migrations can take years. Is that true? Or not?
Yeah, I mean, there’s no one size that fits all, like, you know, smaller customers, migration will like – likely not take years, unless all they have is petabytes of data between 25 years of which – which we have never seen, very – very rarely, but in general, I – I wouldn’t say it would take years.
The largest customer, you – you know, I’ve worked with has probably gone a little about a year, but they’ve gotten consistent throughput on a weekly basis, and I always tell customers, like, "You should be migrating all the time. Maybe some during daytime, more during nighttime, even more during the weekends, but don’t stop migrations. Your wave should be back to back."
Anytime you stop migrations, you’re leaving money on the table. What do I mean by that is you’ve got – our customers have capacity that they can use 24/7, around the clock, and that capacity is dynamic in nature, so every time there is a pause, you’re actually missing out on your capacity or migration quota, and so as long as the migration waves are planned, they’re back to back, there’s not a – large gaps, I would debunk this myth again that it will not take years.
[TCR 00:24:51]
And for long-running migrations it is often the change management that delays the process than the technology and change management is hard. People are hard. And there are just so many complexities large IT admins have to navigate through. And that is often the reason for large – long-running migrations.
Mergers and acquisitions are another reason why, you know, sometimes you get a perception that the migrations are ongoing. It’s just because they finished one wave and now there is another coming. Sometimes customers intentionally spread out their migration by departments. And you know, certain departments just need that much time. So that’s another reason, but yeah, we have seen migrations finishing within months more than migrations finishing over one year.
I was going to say, I’m definitely sensing a theme in a lot of these myths that sure things can be rocky, but if you’re making a plan ahead of time, you’re thinking through the challenges, whether it’s how to get your data into the cloud, whether it is when to migrate, how to migrate, what tools to use, which we’ll talk about in a moment, how to adjust your users to it, it really starts to feel like the issue is not the mechanics of the migration itself, but making sure you know how you’re going to do it and how you’re going to prepare your organization for it too.
Yeah, definitely. If I – if I can add one more thing, consider this as like a move out of a house. Like, sometimes backing requires more planning than moving the content from old house to new house, right?
No, no, Vishal, you have never moved. The way you move is, if the day before you make sure a truck is coming, and you spend the night and morning fiercely packing and telling your friends they can have pizza if they help – they throw your stuff into boxes. It’s an overnight thing and it works 50% of the time, every time.
Well, I guess I have a new set of "phone a friend" to help me move next time.
Oh, I’m – I’m –
And I’m just saying – and Stephen’s probably exhausted his set of friends at this point because he’s, you know, asking them to move all the time.
Sorry, Vishal, I’m going to be out of town when you’re moving. I don’t know when it is, but I’m going to be out of town and unable to help you. Sorry.
No – good.
Well, Stephen, you actually set me up like really well, because by next myth is around tools. Okay, so there’s a myth out there – Vishal, Yogesh – that Microsoft doesn’t have any tools to help companies migrate. Is that true?
Absolutely not true. In fact, we offer a comprehensive suite of tools to migrate you from all the key sources, including on-prem, and third-party clouds – cloud storage providers. And we also offer rich and robust APIs, so our partner ecosystem can complement the niche scenarios that Microsoft cannot offer, which is by design to, you know, create an 80/20.
So any customer can start planning their migration that we talked a lot about from the Microsoft Admin Center. They don’t even need the license tenant. They could use a trial tenant. They could use a test tenant to just start scanning wherever their source is, and as Vishal said, the packing – unless you’re Stephen – takes the longest time, and this is something you can start for free from – admin center, and then you can – you know, you can either finish it right there, or you can start when you are ready as an organization, or you may realize, for the 10% of the really niche scenarios, we want to use a particular tool, and that can be influenced by the planning they –they can start with our first-party tooling.
Totally, I mean, assessment is super-important, as part of any migration. Assessment is like, "What’s our data estate look like … what is our information architecture," you know, what kind of distribution of files, you know, are we talking about, a billion-one kilobyte files or a million-ten – ten meg files? All this becomes very handy, and there’s really not a lot of disruption when you’re scanning your source. You get good insights.
You also get some – you know, edge use cases or limitations – like, okay, there are at least five our ten users, or maybe even more, who are – who are very unique in terms of what their data estate looks like, where we could run into some challenges, and yeah, as Yogesh said, scanning can be done, while other – other change management, you know, things are happening. And it really gives you good insights in terms of gotchas or pitfalls, like what to look for. And that’s directly available in our first-party offering. And as I – as Yogesh said, we work with a lot of third-party providers that we can get into details later, and – you know, what those partnerships look like and how they can complement any complex migration.
So Yogesh, I think you – you used – used the F-word on this show, which is not – it’s dangerous. Did I hear you say free?
I did. I did, and we use it proudly, because we want to offer a red carpet to our customers. And we want to make their onboarding journey as easy as possible, which I know it’s not smooth, often. So absolutely, Stephen, not guilty about using it, at all.
[TCR 00:30:05]
All right, free migration tooling, that is awesome. So we’ve got the free tools that Microsoft provides. Vishal, you briefly mentioned some of the third-party services, why would a customer consider using third-party versus first-party, and can you tell us a little bit more about that for folks who are interested?
Yeah, great question. And you know, I – in fact, spend a lot of my time working with customers who cannot use our first-party tool for different reasons. A lot of them are able to and sometimes they’re not. And what that means is they already have a third-party tool that they own for other reasons, outside of, you know, this specific scope of migration and their – their teams are familiar with that. They don’t need to go and get, you know, security approvals.
There are specific features that, you know, our first-party tools sometimes do not offer that a customer really needs, which a third-party tool can do that, at this point, and we – we have said it loud and clear, our partners bring 50% of our content into our platform. And we work very closely with them by partnering them and our migration API side of business, but there are great tools out there in market that our customers have partnerships with these ISVs.
You know, some of them are like FPoint, Drive iQ, what used to be (inaudible) cloud views, of course, tooling from Quest, and then we had some specialized ECM partners like Xillio, ProvenTech, and customers also used ShareGate across the board, a lot of source-to-destination migrations, things like that. BitTitan as well.
So we got – we, and again, this is just a short list. We have more, but the statement I want to make here is we are in this together. You know, customers want this to be seamless, irrespective of what they – what tool they want to use, and we work with these ISVs very closely to make sure we deliver a joint success for our customers collectively.
Absolutely. And every time we have launched a new first-party tool, we have grown the total size of the PI instead of taking up the PI, and we have consistently seen that whenever we add a particular scenario, there is an equivalent growth in the ISV side as well. And that’s – that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be, and that’s – that’s by design as well.
We want to empower our customers who want to get started and offer them an easy access, and again, a free functionality, but at the same time we empower them and encourage them to use whatever that works their need. And when they choose ISV it reflects a lot on how powerful their tool is, other than, you know, this versus that. So yeah, kudos to those.
All right, you guys – sorry, but you’ve – you’ve prompted a very important question, and I – I need to borrow some special effects for a moment. What type of pie is migration?
So you want me to put a label on migration PI?
I want to know what type of PI the migration is. I’m zooming in [sound effect] so you understand, I want pie. Is it apple pie? Is it pumpkin pie? What type of pie are we making here?
Hmm. Pumpkin pie. [Sound effect.] I’m good with that choice.
I’m happy with it.
I was just going to say I love the names of all these third-party ISVs that we’re partnering with. It – it feels like they should be like robots, like fighting. Like they’re – they’ve got the coolest names right. Anyways, so let’s –
I like how – Vishal did such a great job, Arvind, of talking about all these partners we work with, and you immediately leapt to, "Now make them fight …"
Well, they’re like, the – they have such cool names. They should be, like giant robots.
Okay, okay …
Like Titan and CloudViews, and like they just – I – like they have awesome names.
Dude, that’s 30 – 30% of my job, Arvind. You’re making me go look for a new job now. Come on, don’t – don’t (crosstalk) here.
No, no. No, no, no. Not at all. I love – I love the names, and I love that – that, you know, this – this pie, whether it’s pumpkin or apple is big enough for everyone, is what I would say.
To get started, Arvind, if you’re a new tenant, we have baked the migration as part of your setup, and once you’re done setting up, let’s say you could review a set of users. You know, the first thing you will see is migrate, and we ask you for where you’re coming from.
[TCR 00:35:01]
And based on, you know, that – whether it’s on-prem or whether there’s a third-party cloud storage provider, or it’s an – an exchange or some other mailbox, you know? You can choose where you’re coming from, and then the next thing you do is, you connect to the source. If it’s a cloud connection, it’s obviously browser based. If it’s on-prem, you will need to install an agent so you can talk to your on-prem environment. And we strive to make that experience as easy as possible.
So again, that accidental admin, the teacher helping this migration should be able to get to the next step. And then you have your inventory of the environment, which lets you, you know, plan your next step.
And then in the happy/bad scenario, you should be able to just start your migration and cop your first bits, and get a sense of, you know, this whole process, so pilot is a – is the first step usually customers do, and we highly encourage it. It not only familiarize us with them – familiarize them with this experience, but it also gives them some sense of maybe throughput, like how long would the – the particular drive took them to migrate, and then they can start planning it.
That’s really the next step. Based on the complexity, you know, they often reach out to FastTrack, which is our – Microsoft’s benefit for customers of – for a particular size, and otherwise they will reach out to Vishal, and then he will handhold them with the next step. Vishal, do you want to add something to that?
Yeah. I think just want to make clear customers with 150 seats or more are definitely eligible for FastTrack benefits. Customers can also work with partners, as well, in case they don’t get that benefit. And you know, their partners – our MSP ecosystem is fairly large. And we – we’re really proud, you know, to have 15,000 partners at Microsoft, so obviously, there is a right fit for every industry segment.
And yeah, as Yogesh said, you know, there’s – there’s tooling that’s – that’s available. I mean, obviously, we spend a lot of time on the Enterprise side. And so there’s, there’s obviously, approvals and process and protocols that kick in the enterprise space, including enterprise architecture forum and things like that, but once all this, you know, gets cleared, then migration, scanning and assessment is a breeze for sure. And then obviously, planning will help move, you know, the users in waves and eventually get to the finish line.
Vishal, Arvind and I pride ourselves on making sure this podcast is – he already know where I’m going – we pride ourselves on being a complete resource. As you mentioned, there are 15,000 partners we work with. Feel free to just start listing them, and we’ll just – we’ll wait for you to finish all 15,000. Go for it.
I will go for it. And actually, I started and I just finished to the speed of light.
Wow.
Oh, very, very tricky. And the last kind of question for you both – so we’ve talked about a bunch of migration myths here. We’ve talked about the process and the features that are out there. What other resources are available online if I’m interested in migration and I want to go learn more?
Yeah, so aka.ms/migratetom365 is a great place to start for all content migration. And once you’re in that, you know, you – it will point you to relevant resources. And obviously, you’re our admin center is a great place to learn about these tools as well. Vishal, do you want to add anything to this?
Yeah, and of course, you know, between myself, Yogesh and other product managers, we are usually there at all Microsoft – or, you know, key partner events. Of course, there’s one coming in two weeks. We will have a session on migration, but we will also have customers presenting their stories. There’s at least four customers that will be presenting. Like, we’re – where they were 18 months back and how they’ve planned this and assessed it overall, and they’re all done and – or they’re in flight.
And so I think there’s always good resources available between offline content, online content, events, things like that, and – yeah, Microsoft FastTrack is a great place to start. We obviously have documentation at, you know, Microsoft – Microsoft Learn, and obviously, our published document support docs as well, so – but if enterprise customers – should definitely reach out through their account team, so that’s SMC with the digital specialist, and there’s a lot of content online, as well as there’s a lot of people, partners in the ecosystem to help.
And of course, if you can’t get any of those resources to work for you, we will include Vishal’s personal cell phone number in the show notes. He’s available 24/7, so make it happen.
Oh, man, I feel like we could talk about migration for a long time. I mean, it – this, even though it’s a very technical area, and it’s very important area, I feel like it’s – to me, it’s also a very interesting and fascinating area as well.
We want to say thank you so much to our guests, Vishal and Yogesh, for attending today and – and humoring us with all of our jokes and all of our fun. If people want to know more about you, or they want to reach out to you, Vishal and Yogesh, what’s the best way for folks to – to do so?
[TCR 00:39:56] ] VISHAL LODHA: I mean, people can reach out to me on LinkedIn, of course, linkedin.com/in/vishallodha – V-I-S-H-A-L-L-O-D-H-A, one word. I am also, as I said, a part of our OneDrive Customer Office Hours, which is a public forum that any customer can join. It happens on monthly basis and cohosted by our colleagues from Marketing and Product Management.
And so, yeah, between those forums and LinkedIn, I’m available to help and facilitate any migration conversations and making sure the customer gets the best ROI from the M365 investments.
Absolutely. Yeah. And same thing for me, I’m active on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/yogesh – R-A-T-N-A, part of my last name. That’s my handle for LinkedIn, and as a product management team, we actively review any feedback we receive from the admin center. So customers who have feedback, they can write to us through that channel as well, in addition to everything that Vishal, because we read that, and if you leave your email, we actually reach out to you almost every single time. So that’s a pretty efficient way to reach any of us.
Yeah, as always, make sure to tag your feedback in the admin center with #Sync Up so we know where the feedback came from.
Feedback came from.
All right. If you want to learn more about OneDrive and get the latest and greatest, you can check out our usual resources. There’s the blog at aka.ms/onedrive/blog. As Arvind mentioned at the top, we’ve got our newsletter at aka.ms/onedrive/join. You can find myself at LinkedIn at srice08, and Arvind Mishra is arvindmishra1
As always, we’ve enjoyed hearing from you over the last couple of months, like you, our listeners, and you can reach us at Twitter @onedrive, and if you’ve got questions for us, we do answer them, so just tag it with #syncup, and you can visit our page for links, resources and more at aka.ms/syncup.
You can also send us questions directly by emailing [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to Sync Up wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy Sync Up or find useful, tell your friends. Word of mouth is the best way to get people engaged and help us grow the show. And if you’re curious about other Microsoft podcasts, check out aka.ms/microsoft/podcast.
Thanks for listening to Sync Up. We’ve been your hosts, Arvind and Stephen, and we’re going to catch up with you next month. END Sync Up Podcast EP10: Data on the move—Migrating to OneDrive Guests: Vishal Lodha, Yogesh Ratnaparkhi 2